Converting certain values back and forth is often necessary when developing functions to help your website work the way you want it to. I needed a function that would convert a hex color to rgb and for some reason it took me a while to figure it out.

This function works with both shorthand hex codes such as #f00 and longhand hex codes such as #ff0000. It also accepts the number sign (#) just in case. You can see there are two return lines at the end of the function. The first, which is commented out, will return the rgb values separated by a comma. The second, which is the default, will return an array with the rgb values.

So now with this function in place we can use it like so:

$rgb = hex2rgb("#cc0");
print_r($rgb);

The above function would output:

Array ( [0] => 204 [1] => 204 [2] => 0 )

Since we are going one way with this, might as well go the other. Here is a function to convert rgb to a hex color: